Willy Joy mix: This Chicago based messer popped up to my attention recently via the DJC blog, always a source of tasty nosiey fucked pop cheese bizness. Its a fifty plus mix of blends spanning rap, pop, rock, electro, 80s, booty, club and some more in between. Perfect material to soundtrack the disgust of Texan parents who think who fancy the puritanism of Footloose rather than the grinding of their highschool kids.

Toddla T: Prancehall had an interview with this guy where he struggles to put him in a category, concluding he sounds "like someone who is trying to make dancehall/techno/garage/house/hip-hop all at once within the same track without coming across like those dicks who make stuff like Baltimore bootlegs of kuduro tracks with an Akon acappella and a Daft Punk sample hook." It's seriously dope shit that'd have me bouncing off the walls were I to hear it out, it's the bass line evolution; no fucking morbid dull dubstep for this guy, it's like he sacrificed a hyper cat that feeds off pure catnip and made DMZ drink its blood.

Pirate Soundsystem: If even the description of Toddla T has you quaking in your dancing shoes, then do check out Pirate Soundsystem, very much in a similar vein with far more clippings of early rave effects popping over the top for shits and giggles. The remix of Ms Ting's "Love Guide" (at Hypem) is a seriously impatient dance-hall monster. More recently they've screwed with Drop the Lime and Hadouken. This lot played the George Bernard Shaw back in September, any word on how it was? Much of this sounds like the funky house that fella Woebot was bigging up some time ago as a far more significant form than Dupstep. The two most have had a bastard hate child after slaughtering some indie kids in the mean time.

Fela Ani-Kulapo Kuti: Coming out of Lagos, this bloke has a tragic story that you can read over at his Myspace, currently enjoying an album of his - simply called Afrobeat - at the moment. Imagine African percussion and chanting fused to the sound of sixties jazz, with a sharp dash of the black power politics he picked up when he was in the states during the sixties and translated back into a pan-Africanism via his lyrics. Most tracks start off as a flurry of tooting horn sections and then relax as a choir start to bring up the tension. The Hype Machine has some of his stuff and the more contemporary Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra are a group that could easily share the same blog post with him. And so now they do.

Labels: afrobeat, In Me Ears, Mix, Music

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